Technical Field
This disclosure relates systems and methods that allow data stored in an entity-relationship model to be mapped to a graph-based data format and/or queried using a query language associated with the graph-based data format.
Related Art
Most of the mid-size and large companies employ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage their business data and business processes. These ERP systems store business information (e.g., purchase orders, equipment inventories, customer information, or the like) that can be represented as business objects (stored in, for example, an entity data model (EDM) format in ERP systems). Multiple business objects can span a business object graph by referencing each other. For instance, a purchase order might reference customer information or vice versa. However, searching for these “related” business objects can sometimes prove difficult. For instance, to find all objects that are related to each other, a user might have to conduct multiple complex queries using the query language that is provided by the system.
There are also query languages that are normally associated with a different format of data that produce the same results at the complex queries discussed above, but that require simpler queries. For example, SPARQL, which is a query language associated with data stored in a Resource Description Framework (RDF) format would allow queries of all objects that are related to each other without the need for the multiple complex queries described above. It would, therefore, be desirable to use a second kind of query language (e.g., SPARQL) to query data objects stored in a format not normally associated with that query language.